Guest of Honor: Andreas Kohlbecker
“Herbert W. Franke, artist, theorist, science fiction author, and speleologist, was a polymath and a pioneer of generative and computational art. His writings in these fields are an invaluable source of inspiration, certainly for future generations. They are also the basis for historical research on generative and digital art. It is therefore a great honor for me to present the Herbert W. Franke Archive web application, which makes his manuscripts fully accessible to the public in digital form, and of course to be part of the Generative Art Summit, which brings together a wealth of actors in generative and digital art.”
Biography
From an early age, he was fascinated by natural phenomena and the processes that drive things on the inside.
In the 90th he studied Biology in which he holds a diploma. In parallel he was one of the pioneers for multimeda application in the early World Wide Web at “zeitwerk”.
At the advent of the new millennium, he was engaged in the working group “Scientific Databases and Visualization” at the European Media Laboratory GmbH. During this period he was involved into multiple media art projects and had a keen interest in the algorithmic genesis of texts. In this context he was an active member of the art collective “Versfabrik”, where he developed both hard- and software components for various artworks. In 2004, he commenced his tenure as a research assistant in the field of biodiversity informatics at the Botanical Museum and Botanical Garden in Berlin. In this capacity, he was responsible for the architecture and development of various national and international scientific software projects. At the same time, he started together with Jan Zappe (robolab.de) “Raumfühler”, an art project that was dedicated to the artistic exploration of electromagnetic fields. He is now a Digital Manager at the ZKM, where he is responsible for building a state-of-the-art data infrastructure and for opening up the archive and collection to make these and other treasures of the ZKM fully accessible to the public.